“chadbourne_camper”
Camper Van Chadbourne
Revenge of Camper Van Chadbourne
Knitting Factory
Hot on the heels of last year’s Camper Van Chadbourne reissue comes this collection of newly minted tracks. Dr. Eugene Chadbourne’s esoteric banjo and guitar riffing works well with the experimental folk jazz of two ex-Camper Van Beethovens, Jonathan Segel (violin, other stringed instruments) and Victor Krummenacher (bass). Like the Holy Modal Rounders deconstructed and put back together incorrectly, it can come off as a twisted streak of back porch picking – a kind of “hey, the tape recorder was on!” sort of feeling. Camper Van Chadbourne make it difficult to tell whether the tottering compositions are collections of brilliant mistakes, documents of unprepared improvisation, or some sort of cog in a gigantic master plan to convince people that music could be stranger than you could ever imagine and you’d still like it. It’s still hard to deny that as plunkety as this stuff gets, it still reaches a basic chord in a lot of people.
Knitting Factory Works, 74 Leonard St., New York, NY 10013; http://www.knittingfactory.com/
